Adam Wexler, a founder and CEO of Rank ‘Em, has an ambitious plan to recognize the best songs ever recorded by each and every musical artist of all time. He and his three co-founders are launching today a platform that relies not on commercial success but on the collective intelligence of the fan base to sort each artist’s catalog from best to worst material.
Rank ‘Em is the result of 18 months of bootstrapped development and has invented crowdsourcing ranking methods that are well differentiated from the nearest competitive user-generated sites RateItAll and Listology. The company believes that fans of a particular artist will take pride in expressing themselves and that they will help the uninformed come to appreciate new favorite titles.
The foremost path to monetization is driving transactions as listeners discover and buy new songs. There will also be opportunities for Rank ‘Em to create and deliver valuable content based on its charts and the metadata it is collecting. Further expansion is possible into such categories as television shows, movies, and books.
We are all infatuated by lists and rankings. Look at the headlines on most any magazine on a newsstand, and consider the number of books of lists that are published on a wide array of topics. (I wish I had a list to add to this post, but I’ll wait to enter my choices on Rank ‘Em.) This company should resonate with music fans across all genres and become the highest ranking brand in its category.
